Nintendogs:

Max is my German Shepherd, and a natural at Disc competitions. He won 1st place in the open competition today with a total of 21 pts and some very nice jumping catches at long distances. Way to go Max!

On the down side, he’s forgotten how to sit down on command. So do you delete the command and start again or hope that it comes back? At this point, we’re unlikely to do well in the Obedience trials.

My daughter’s beagle, Rachel, seems to not like canned dog food. So, no more for her. Max has an adversion to sticks, and growled at the thing until I put it away.

Animal Crossing – Wild World:

Wrote a ton of letters and sent out gifts to the whole dern town. From playing on the GameCube, I know that letters are key to successful relationships with the town folks. Oh, and bizarre real life parallel – real estate agents with databases that they consistent send relevant and useful correspondence with tend to do really well. If you meet an agent who’s netting 6 Million Gross Commission Income or more you can bet that they are sending out letters. Works in real life, works in Animal Crossing.

She got the teal Nintendo DS Best Friends bundle – came with:

1. A teal & black Nintendo DS system – the teal is a lovely pearl tone and is offset by the black very well. It’s a darn good looking device.
2. The Best Friends Version of Nintendogs – complete with the following breeds: Labrador Retriever, Miniature Dachshund, German Shepherd, Golden Retriever, Beagle and Yorkshire Terriers
3. A DS shammie for cleaning your dual screens. Shaped like a little bone too…darn cute.
4. A Nintendogs skin – subtle but cute and should protect her case.

She adores it, and commented that her Teal/Black and my Pink/White versions go really well together. Extra points for both form factor and aesthetics, Nintendo!

Lik-sang has fantastic anime toys – animal crossing figures – you could even assemble a small pikmen army!

Now, lessons learned:

If you buy from a vendor who is off-shore, you won’t get a warranty. I don’t plan on mistreating my DS, but I don’t have a warranty during this first year like my daughter’s US version will. Take care!

Lik-sang has been involved with law suits over their international commerce service. Essentially Sony trying to keep them from selling PSPs to European customers before they could buy it local. That was in August, and things seem to be quieter. Nintendo sued them back in 2002 and won, that time over the sale of devices that could copy Gameboy Advanced games. Seems that one was a weaker arguement, and the founder of Lik-Sang published his thoughts on the suit.

I’m very happy all in all with my Pink DS – wouldn’t send it back for the warranty – as soon as I get my camera to focus on the screen I’ll start loading up some shots

White, teal and graphite are still available with quick shipping – pink ships in 1-2 weeks:

Buy Nintendo Nintendo DS (Candy Pink) – Play-Asia.com

If you actually need a pink one by Christmas, and don’t want a bidding war at ebay, try these folks:

Lik-Sang – Candy Pink Nintendo DS

Check out these pups…terribly cute! It doesn’t look like it’s too difficult to toss the ball or frisbee, or even swing that jumprope.

Can’t wait for Christmas!!

The notion in a nutshell – the Nintendo DS has 802.11b wireless, but what if it acted as both a device and a hub? Allowing you to lilypad DS systems – creating organic gaming network? All wifi geek obstacles aside, I loved this idea for one reason…

What if you wanted to do something really visionary…

What if you…

• created a system that appealled to little girls and young women in a way that no other system had, just through it’s form factor.
  [Nintendo DS doesn't simply have 2 screens - it has a whole new interaction dynamic.]
• launched a killer app that was ‘best of breed’ (forgive the pun’ of all the artificial companion, virtual pet apps. [Nintendogs is selling out in the UK and you can't buy the Best Friends Bundles in retail stores in the US.]
• bundled the app and device into hot Christmas sellers right before parents are most likely to shell out the ~$150 price point.

Suddenly you have a high density of some of the most agile communicators on the planet. A substrate for something particularly fantastic. A entrance point to a highly lucrative and as yet, virutally untapped market.

Maybe the DS isn’t Nintendo’s trojan horse into a brave new world of girl gamers. But man…what if it was?

BTW, if this post was at all interesting and you haven’t read , “Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson, maybe you should.

Anticipation for the Christmas pup rises, and I’ve been watching Amazon and Froogle for prices on Nintendogs Bundles. There was a limited release of bundles – one in Pink sold through Target and ToysRUs, and another in teal pearl blue that could be found in most stores. Not that I’m going to buy one, mind you, Santa had the elves take care of that. But if you need to buy a bundle now, it wouldn’t be cheap. Last I saw them, you could get them for about $129. Now, Amazon has sellers that will give you the blue one for a cool $250, and the Pink for $365.
Hachi machi! It’s sold out in the UK, and very nearly sold out here. It’ll be curious to see after Christmas sales numbers.

Woof!

A nice primer on Nintendogs:

Nintendogs – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But, I wanted to find out more about the game itself and found this review. I’m sure you’ll hear more post-Christmas regarding our Nintendog journeys. This article does a great job of showing how Nintendogs tapped into a underserved need in the Japanese marketplace – dog ownership. Dan talks about this as a key element in good game design. I might extend that to a key element in good Product design – a marketing lesson for every product manager.

Lost Garden: Nintendogs: The case of the non-game that barked like a game